The present invention relates to a watercraft, especially a sailboat having at least one hull and one mast.
Sailboats that have no keel, and therefore have no dead ballast that is situated low in the boat, capsize when the righting moment is less than the moment that effects heeling-over of the sailboat. This capsizing behavior is shown, for example, by all sailing dinghies and, due to their specific construction, generally also by all multihull boats, such as catamarans, trimarans, etc.
With smaller sailing dinghies, one can manage to right a capsized sailboat by utilizing the leverage formed by the dropped center-board or leeboard of the sailing dinghy; in other words, the crew of the capsized sailboat tries to climb onto the leeboard so that the sailboat can right itself as a result of the force thereby exerted. With large sailboats of this type, the righting moment that can by formed by the leeboard and the crew of the sailboat is generally too small, because due to the mass of the sailboat and the sail that is in the water, the overturning, capsizing moment is too great. As a result, capsizing of larger sailboats of this type frequently leads to the complete loss of these boats, since the crew, for the aforementioned reasons, can no longer right the sailboat even if the storm that originally caused the capsizing has subsided.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a watercraft with a righting aid that permits the crew, without external aid, to again right a capsized watercraft.